Abstract
We present a novel physics-based concatenative sound synthesis (CSS) methodology for congruent interactions across physical, graphical, aural and haptic modalities in Virtual Environments. Navigation in aural and haptic corpora of annotated audio units is driven by user interactions with highly realistic photogrammetric based models in a game engine, where automated and interactive positional, physics and graphics data are supported. From a technical perspective, the current contribution expands existing CSS frameworks in avoiding mapping or mining the annotation data to real-time performance attributes, while guaranteeing degrees of novelty and variation for the same gesture.

Abstract
In tonal music, musical tension is strongly associated with musical expression, particularly with expectations and emotions. Most listeners are able to perceive musical tension subjectively, yet musical tension is difficult to be measured objectively, as it is connected with musical parameters such as rhythm, dynamics, melody, harmony, and timbre. Musical tension specifically associated with melodic and harmonic motion is called tonal tension. In this article, we are interested in perceived changes of tonal tension over time for chord progressions, dubbed tonal tension profiles. We propose an objective measure capable of capturing tension profile according to different tonal music parameters, namely, tonal distance, dissonance, voice leading, and hierarchical tension. We performed two experiments to validate the proposed model of tonal tension profile and compared against Lerdahl's model and MorpheuS across 12 chord progressions. Our results show that the considered four tonal parameters contribute differently to the perception of tonal tension. In our model, their relative importance adopts the following weights, summing to unity: dissonance (0.402), hierarchical tension (0.246), tonal distance (0.202), and voice leading (0.193). The assumption that listeners perceive global changes in tonal tension as prototypical profiles is strongly suggested in our results, which outperform the state-of-the-art models.

Abstract
Background: The occurrence of an orofacial trauma can originate health, social, economic and professional problems. A 13-year boy suffered the avulsion of tooth 11 and 21, lost at the scenario. Methods: Three intraoral appliances were manufactured: A Hawley appliance with a central expansion screw and two central incisors (1), trumpet edentulous anterior tooth appliance (2) and a customized splint (3) were designed as part of the rehabilitation procedure. Objectively assessing the sound quality of the trumpet player with these new devices in terms of its spectral, temporal, and spectro-temporal audio properties. A linear frequency response microphone was adopted for precision measurement of pitch, loudness, and timbre descriptors. Results: Pitch deviations may result from the different intra-oral appliances due to the alteration of the mouth cavity, respectively, the area occupied and modification/interaction with the anatomy. This investigation supports the findings that the intra-oral appliance which occupies less volume is the best solution in terms of sound quality. Conclusions: Young wind instrumentalists should have dental impressions of their teeth made, so their dentist has the most reliable anatomy of the natural teeth in case of an orofacial trauma. Likewise, the registration of their sound quality should be done regularly to have standard parameters for comparison.

Abstract
In this paper, we advance an enhanced method for computing Harte et al.’s (2006) Harmonic Change Detection Function (HCDF), which aims to detect harmonic transitions in musical audio signals. Each of the HCDF component blocks is revisited in light of recent advances in harmonic description and transformation. To evaluate our proposal, we compute an exhaustive grid search to compare the multiple proposed algorithms and a large set of parameterizations across four large style-specific musical datasets. Our results show that the newly proposed methods and parameter optimization improve the detection of harmonic changes by 5.57% (f-score) with respect to previous methods. Furthermore, while guaranteeing recall values at >99%, our other method improves precision by 6.28%.

Abstract
Typical polar digital power amplifiers (DPAs) employ unit-cells operated in class-E or D-1, denoting a switched-resistance operation which degrades linearity. Besides introducing higher demand on digital predistortion (DPD), it also requires extra quantization bits, impacting the overall efficiency and system complexity. To address this, the present work makes use of an optimized constant-current cascode unit-cell which is combined with reduced conduction angle to achieve linear and efficient operation, while minimizing the effort on DPD and/or calibration. A design strategy is developed which focuses on the cascode bias voltage and transistor relative dimensions as design parameters, allowing cascode efficiency optimization without compromising linearity or reliability. A single-ended polar switched constant-current DPA is implemented in 180-nm standard CMOS. Continuous-wave measurements performed at 800 MHz demonstrate an output power of 24 dBm with a PAE of 47%. The DPA dynamic behavior was tested with a 64-QAM signal with 10 MS/s, achieving an average PAE of 20.9% with a peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of 8.7 dB and adjacent-channel leakage ratio (ACLR) = 40.34 dB. These results demonstrate comparable performance with the prior art while using only 6-bits clocked at 100 MHz baseband sampling frequency.

Abstract
A high production yield, Y = 1 - pfail, and thus a low failure rate, pfail, is a key requirement for successful chip design and the design of many other technical products and systems. We focus on IC design in the analog and mixedsignal domains, where Monte Carlo (MC) techniques have been a standard method for many years (see "Important Monte Carlo Rules Engineers Should Know"). Circuits have to be reliable under certain ranges of environmental parameters, such as supply voltage (V) and temperature (T). Furthermore, the set of semiconductor technology parameters (P) varies significantly, from die to die (global variations) to device to device (local variations, called mismatch). Many circuit tricks are known to minimize all of these influences (for example, using cascodes for a high power-supply rejection, differential pairs to cancel out threshold voltages, special layout techniques, and so on), but at some point problems become hard to anticipate, and further improvements are difficult to achieve. We must accept such variations and need to analyze their impact on production yield, which is a function of these parameters and the specifications (such as design topology and component sizes, among others). © 2009-2012 IEEE.